Web Analytics Tutorial

Lesson 1 – What is Web Analytics?

Further Study

Figure 5. The Summary Page Request Report can be used to find the number of hits to your home page.

One of the most common metrics people want to know when they first begin to think about web analytics is how many hits they have on their home page. Figure 5 is a Summary Page Requests report. Note the entry for ‘/’. This is the home page of the site. As this is usually one of the most commonly visited pages on a site it often appears near the top of the report. In Figure 5, you will notice that the entry for the home page has 4,886 hits.

The remaining lessons in this tutorial delve into greater details about specific items we have covered and explore much more that we have not. These lessons will help you figure out where your visitors are coming from, how they use your site, and how you can make the site work better for those visitors who you want to attract to the site.

If you have not already, you should take time to familiarize yourself with the Summary interface. The balance of the lessons assume you are comfortable navigating the reports and doing basic configuration. If you have just set up Summary for the first time, read through the Users’ Guide and other documentation and play around with the software a bit to see what it has, where to find reports and how to set up basic configurations.

There are many more resources on the web for web analytics. A search for phrases like ‘web analytics,’ ‘web metrics,’ ‘website analysis’ and ‘web mining’ should bring up a plethora of sources.

In review, each unit that Summary tracks provides a different metric. They each have advantages and disadvantages and each has a different purpose. Often it is helpful when developing a ‘radar’ or ‘dashboard’ for your company to choose one metric that fits well with your business model and stick to that when reporting statistics. This way you have a consistent measure that can be used for accurate trend analysis. The accuracy of the value in relating to some external, real-world quantity (such as actual visitors or actual impressions) becomes less important when it is used as a relative value for measurement of growth.